As a lover of musicals, I’m generally sympathetic to filmmakers who pay tribute to them, even when their emulations of the genre are more emotional than cinematic (or even musical). But Robert Cary’s tale of an aspiring nightclub singer (cowriter Isabel Rose) who’s nostalgically tied to her parents’ era is so lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over. Andrew McCarthy is OK as a rehearsal pianist, resembling Steven Spielberg, who wins the singer’s heart from an insensitive phony (Cameron Bancroft), but the only reason for seeing this is Eartha Kitt, who performs an electric nightclub number before dispensing a few clumsy lines of worldly wisdom. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Winner of two top prizes at Cannes, Gus Van Sant’s fictionalized drama about the Columbine massacre was generated by conversations with the teenage actors about their own lives, and reportedly none of the dialogue was scripted. Perhaps as a result this offers little insight into the motivations of teenage mass murderers, unless one counts such threadbare ideas as a TV documentary about Nazism idly watched by the killers. What interests Van Sant is why no one saw the massacre coming, and his exciting and rigorous structure follows several characters in overlapping trajectories and time frames (a method derived from Bela Tarr’s Satantango) so that we’re constantly noticing details we missed earlier. The effect is riveting and tellingnot always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening. 81 min. (JR) Read more
Dawoud Abdel-Sayed’s 2001 hit Egyptian musical about three men who trade mistresses, information, and destinies over two decades has only half a dozen numbers over 135 minutes, but each one is pivotal to the thematic development and the satirical treatment of class difference and corruption. Undoubtedly the strangest occurs after the citizen’s maid and mistress steals the manuscript of his first novel and turns it over to the thief (Egyptian pop star Shaaban Abdel-Rehim), who burns it because he finds it Islamically incorrect and then has his eye gouged out by the enraged novelist; nurses and fellow hospital patients provide Abdel-Rehim’s musical and dancing backup as he laments his two-dimensional sight. As ambitious in its way as Scorsese’s Casino and no less violent in its abusive details, this is social criticism with a vengeance. In Arabic with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Jay Craven adapted this indie feature from a novel by Scott Lax about the 1970 Kent State shootings and their aftermath, tracing the lives of many students as well as a local high school teacher (Marin Hinkle) who loses her job as a result of her antiwar activism. There are moments of awkward exposition, choppy continuity, and long-windedness, yet the overall feeling for the period is just right, and the performances are highly affecting, with old hands like Henry Gibson, Fred Willard, and Martin Mull interacting with younger players as deftly as the fictional story with the archival footage. This is more believable than most depictions of the period because the politics are informed by historical reflection; prompted by his own research, Craven changes one of Lax’s major characters into an agent provocateur on campus. With Jonathan Woodward, Charlie Finn, Lucas Ford, Sean Nelson, Jonathan Brandis, and Kiera Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie). 104 min. (JR) Read more
If you can figure out all the intricate and incestuous family backstory of this domestic melodrama by Claude Chabrol, there’s a certain amount to appreciate, though most of it’s more cerebral than emotional. Caroline Eliacheff, a child psychiatrist who worked with Chabrol on The Ceremony and Merci pour le chocolat, both of which I found more enjoyable, collaborated on the script with Louise Lambriches and Chabrol. The present-day plot circulates around an anonymous broadside delving into the Vichy family connections of a woman running for mayor in a town in Bordeaux (Nathalie Baye)a catalyst recalling the poison-pen letter in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Le corbeauas well as the budding romance between her daughter and stepson, protected by a sympathetic aunt (Suzanne Flon), and the growing estrangement of her philandering husband (Bernard Le Coq). This kept me absorbed, but I was less than fully satisfied at the end. In French with subtitles. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
This 1965 period yakuza thriller by Seijun Suzuki (Pistol Opera) is something of a disappointment. Aside from a few striking visual fancies (including the eccentric ‘Scope framings behind the credits and a few flashy uses of color later), this is a routine exercise about a gangster and his artistic kid brother seeking refuge in a rural mining outpost during the early 20th century. In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
This black-and-white yakuza thriller (1958) has a few elements of Seijun Suzuki’s signature weirdness and baroque imaginationchiefly the stolen diamonds swallowed by one character shortly before dying, whose corpse then has to be sliced open to retrieve them. Suzuki also makes interesting surrealistic use of a studio where department-store mannequins are sculpted and baked, where the corpse’s sister (the title cutie) works as a model, and where the diamonds are hidden once more. (It’s highly unlikely that he saw Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, which exploits a similar setting, but the parallels are striking.) In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Although I gave up reading the New Republic with any regularity long before it acquired master fabricator Stephen Glass as a reporter in the late 90s, I appreciate writer-director Billy Ray’s agenda, which is to show how ready and willing Glass’s colleagues and readers were to be duped by himand how we as spectators are too. Hayden Christensen plays Glass with just the right amount of flattering charm, and Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, and Chloe Sevigny all do well as his fellow staffers. Given recent similar incidents of young con artists posing as journalists, this is a timely and compelling film, but I wish the filmmakers had widened their focus to address the kinds of journalistic corruption that go beyond simple fibbing. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Eishy Hayata, a Japanese emigre to Colombia, wrote and executive-produced this vanity film celebrating his violent exploits from the 1970s onward in establishing the Colombian emerald trade. He also plays himself (rather woodenly) in the present, while casting handsome Luis Velasco as his younger self and allowing Andrew Molina credit as producer-director. Shot on location in Colombia, this begins as a western but eventually mutates into an industrial thriller, with left-wing guerillas and union workers as the bad guys. Read more
Sometimes the best photojournalism comes from being in the right place at the right time, which is certainly true of this lucid and gripping on-location account of the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela, instigated by oil barons (with the alleged support of the CIA), that toppled the democratically elected socialistic government of Hugo Chavez for 48 breathless hours. The role of the state-operated TV channel versus the more popular channels controlled by oil interests proved to be pivotal, and this part of the story alone makes the film well worth seeing. Directed by Kim Bartley and Donnache O’Briain of Ireland, this proves that the best documentaries currently outshine Hollywood features as the most watchable, energizing, and relevant movies around. In English and subtitled Spanish. 74 min. (JR) Read more
A program of four experimental films and, judging from the three I’ve seen, a first-rate onethough one shouldn’t conclude from the title that gender and sexual orientation are the only concerns here. Martin Arnold’s Piece Touchee (1989, 15 min.), Passage a l’Acte (1993, 12 min.), and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, 15 min.) are all elaborate manipulations of brief sequences from black-and-white Hollywood features (The Concrete Jungle, To Kill a Mockingbird, and one or more of the Andy Hardy pictures with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland respectively) that make them register as exceptionally weird and deranged. Abigail Child’s 56-minute Is This What You Were Born For? (1987), which I haven’t seen, also makes use of found footage. (JR) Read more
Maya Deren (1917-’61) did more than anyone else to create the American experimental film as we know it, and this 2002 German documentary (in English) by Martina Kudlacek is the best portrait of an experimental filmmaker that I know. Kudlacek steeps us in Deren’s artistic and bohemian milieu (basically Greenwich Village in the 40s and 50s, though she made her first film in Los Angeles and later spent much time in Haiti), and because Deren did such a good job of recording and documenting her own activities, the film is able to provide a detailed sense of what she was like as both a person and an artist. Among the eloquent friends and associates interviewed are Jonas Mekas, Katherine Dunham, Stan Brakhage, Amos and Marcia Vogel, Graeme Ferguson, Alexander Hammid (her second husband and sometime collaborator), Judith Malina, Miriam Arsham, Rita Christiani, Teiji Ito, and Chao-li Chi. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Sometimes the best photojournalism comes from being in the right place at the right time, which is certainly true of this lucid and gripping on-location account of the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela, instigated by oil barons (with the alleged support of the CIA), that toppled the democratically elected socialistic government of Hugo Chavez for 48 breathless hours. The role of the state-operated TV channel versus the more popular channels controlled by oil interests proved to be pivotal, and this part of the story alone makes the film well worth seeing. Directed by Kim Bartley and Donnache O’Briain of Ireland, this was among the top ten audience favorites at the recent Chicago International Film Festival and won the Silver Hugo for best documentary feature; it proves again that the best documentaries currently outshine Hollywood features as the most watchable, energizing, and relevant movies around. 74 min. Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
As Dave Kehr originally described it, “a classic example of the poetry of terror.” Georges Franju’s 1959 horror film, based on a novel by Jean Redon, is about a plastic surgeon who’s responsible for the car accident that leaves his daughter disfigured; he attempts to rebuild her face with transplants from attractive young women he kidnaps with the aid of his assistant. As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, but it’s much too elegant to warrant the usual “psychotronic” treatment. It may be Franju’s best feature, and Eugen Schufftan’s exquisite cinematography deserves to be seen in 35-millimeter. With Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Francois Guerin, and Claude Brasseur; Maurice Jarre composed the music. In French with subtitles. 88 min. Music Box. Read more
A superior soap opera, evocative at times of Warren Beatty’s Reds, this follows the joint humanitarian efforts and eventual romance of a pampered American living in England (Angelina Jolie) and an angry but dedicated renegade doctor (Clive Owen) who ministers to the sick in North Africa during the mid-80s, in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, and in Chechnya during the mid-90s. The urgency of their causes is forcefully conveyed, along with their sincerity and their anger at the obstacles they face. Shooting in ‘Scope, director Martin Campbell makes this scenic but never unduly touristic (no easy feat); the script is by Caspian Tredwell-Owen. With Teri Polo, Linus Roache, Noah Emmerich, and Yorick van Wageningen. 127 min. (JR) Read more
